Pawns in Guantanamo's game

Boston Globe Editorial

March 11, 2007

THE NEW SHERIFF in town at the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Robert
Gates, has already set a different tone by firing officials responsible
for the Walter Reed scandal. But there is a Walter Reed-style scandal
of human rights abuses now festering at the Guantanamo detention center
in Cuba that becomes his responsibility the longer it continues under
his watch. Gates can begin the process of restoring the United States'
reputation as a respecter of human rights by releasing 17 Guantanamo
detainees from China.

The 17 are Uighurs (pronounced wee-gurs) -- members of a Muslim
minority that feels oppressed by Beijing. They had been living in a
village in Afghanistan when the United States began its war there in
2001. They have said they fled US bombing for shelter in Pakistan,
where they were taken into custody by Pakistanis who were getting
bounties of as much as $5,000 a head for captives. In 2006, after five
were declared not to be enemy combatants, Albania accepted them as
refugees. The military acknowledges that none of the 17 remaining is
considered enough of a threat to be scheduled at this point for one of
the up to 80 trials planned for this year.

In fact, all but one would have left by now if the United States
could find a placethat would take them. But between former secretary of
defense Donald Rumsfeld's rhetoric about Guantanamo detainees being the
"worst of the worst " and the unwillingness of countries to incur
China's disfavor, no country, including Albania, has stepped forward to
accept any more.

The United States will not release them to China, for fear of the
treatment they would receive there. Since there are about 2,000 Uighurs
living in the United States, this would be a logical home for them, but
the Department of Homeland Security says no. Gates should solve this
problem, even if it means overruling Homeland Security and even if it
means they become sought after for network television broadcasts about
their treatment in US custody.

They would have much to tell. Like hundreds of detainees who have
been in and out of Guantanamo since 2002, the Uighurs would likely have
been released soon after their capture -- if it were not for the China
connection. In 2002 the United States was seeking China's support in
the United Nations for the war the Bush administration planned against
Iraq. Washington agreed to put a Uighur resistance movement on a list
of terrorist organizations. It also allowed Chinese intelligence agents
to come to Guantanamo and interrogate the Uighur detainees, an
experience that made the detainees fearful for the safety of their
families back in China's Xinjiang region.

Until December, the Uighurs still at Guantanamo had been able to
socialize with one another in their Turkic language, which is quite
different from Arabic or the Afghan languages most of the other
detainees speak. But there has been a crackdown at the base after three
suicides and a riot last year marked the beginning of the tenure of a
new commander, Rear Admiral Harry Harris. Harris has put the Uighurs
and many other detainees into a new 180-cell building called Camp Six
where the detainees spend at least 22 hours of each day in isolation.
The military says the Uighurs were put there either because they
attacked guards or trashed their quarters during the riot last May.

Sabin Willett, a Boston lawyer with Bingham McCutchen who has been
doing pro bono work for the Uighurs, links their assignment to Camp Six
to a filing he made seeking their release. He visited them in January
and said that the isolation, a punishment reserved for the
worst-behaved inmates in civilian US prisons, is taking a toll.

A Uighur who had been friendly now looks unsmiling and blank and
taps his foot constantly on the floor, Willet said. "His whole affect
changed," and he said he had begun to hear voices. Unless something is
done, the lawyer said, "We will have created an insane asylum in Camp
Six. There will be people who are insane when this is over."

When this will be over is hard to foresee. The United States
originally established the facility at Guantanamo as a detention center
to hold and interrogate suspected terrorists before they were quickly
put on trial. None has been yet. No one envisioned Guantanamo as a
long-term prison. "We have no desire to be the world's jailer," said
Pentagon spokesman Commander Jeffrey Gordon in an interview.

In Afghanistan, Taliban officials have benefited from an amnesty,
but at Guantanamo the United States continues to hold Taliban foot
soldiers from the 2001 battles to overthrow their regime. Individuals
who had little if anything to do with the Taliban or terrorism are
being radicalized by their experience in US custody. "Now we have a
wolf by the ears," Willett said.

A bill passed last year by Congress even strips detainees of their
habeas corpus rights to challenge their continued incarceration. After
a federal circuit court last month upheld the constitutionality of that
law, it is unlikely that the Supreme Court will rule on it until later
this year at the earliest. Before that, Congress could restore habeas
corpus rights under bills now pending, but there is little chance that
it could muster two-thirds majorities in both houses to override an
expected veto from President Bush.

So Guantanamo will continue as an international symbol of this
country's retreat from its rule-of-law traditions. Gates has wisely
decided not to go ahead with a planned $100 million court complex for
the base. He could make it even clearer that he is changing the
self-destructive course the country is on there by releasing the
Uighurs.